Hampton, Darlene Rose, 1976-
2011-04-11T21:42:32Z
2011-04-11T21:42:32Z
2010-12
http://hdl.handle.net/1794/11070
x, 160 p. : ill. (some col.)
Although the web appears to be a welcoming space for women, online spaces--like offline spaces--are rendered female through associations with the personal/private, embodiment, or an emphasis on intimacy. As such, these spaces are marked, marginalized, and often dismissed. Using an explicitly interdisciplinary approach that combines cultural studies models with feminist theory, new media studies, and performance, Beyond Resistance uses fandom as a way to render visible the invisible ways that repressive discourses of gender are woven throughout digital culture. I examine a variety of online fan practices that use popular media to perform individual negotiations of repressive ideologies of sex and gender, such as fan-authored fiction, role-playing games, and vids and machinima--digital videos created from re-editing television and video game texts. Although many of these negotiations are potentially resistive, I demonstrate how that potential is being limited and redirected in ways that actually reinforce constructions of gender that support the dominant culture.
The centrality of traditional notions of sex and gender in determining the value of fan practices, through both popular representation and critical analysis, serves as a microcosm of how discourses of gender are operating within digital culture to support the continued gendering of the public and private spheres within digital space. This gendering contributes to the ongoing subordination of women under patriarchy by marginalizing or dismissing their concerns, labor, and cultural tastes.
Committee in charge: Priscilla Ovalle, Chairperson;
Kathleen Karlyn, Member;
Michael Aronson, Member;
Kate Mondloch, Outside Member
en_US
University of Oregon
University of Oregon theses, Dept. of English, Ph. D., 2010;
Gender
Digital culture
Fandom
Intimacy
LiveJournal
Machinima
Vidding
American studies
Multimedia communications
Web studies
Gender studies
Beyond resistance: Gender, performance, and fannish practice in digital culture
Gender, performance, and fannish practice in digital culture
Thesis

Soles, Carter Michael
2009-04-23T22:24:43Z
2009-04-23T22:24:43Z
2008-09
http://hdl.handle.net/1794/9021
xiii, 429 p. : ill. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.
My dissertation argues that the film comedies of Kevin Smith, through their willingness to depict and verbalize gender-bending, queer desire, and deviant sexual practices, exemplify the role independent "slacker" cinema played in the 1990s explosion of American queer media visibility. Couched in witty verbal comedy, Smith's films depict the tensions and dangers Generation-X males face as they negotiate the culturally enforced gap separating male homosociality (intense friendship, male bonding) from explicit male-male homoerotic desire in contemporary U.S. culture. The project takes Smith's career as a metonym for independent slacker cinema (which includes films by Smith, Richard Linklater, Jim Jarmusch, and Judd Apatow) and argues that Smith's films have been successful because they tap into and exploit both the 1990s boom in independent queer media production and the particular interests and needs of actual young white slackers, including how these young men navigate tensions related not only to gender and sexuality but also to race and class (all of which are evident in their taste for mainstream superhero comics and the Star Wars films).
Chapter II argues that Smith's debut feature, Clerks (1994), exemplifies, through its plot and formal elements, the homosocial buddy relation that suppresses male-male homoerotic desire by channeling it into men's rivalries over women. The chapter exposes the misogyny inherent to the slacker's homosocial group and discusses his fear/fascination with masculine women such as domineering mothers, bossy girlfriends, and (in later Smith films) lesbians. Chapter III argues that Mallrats (1995) shares key narrative properties and subject matter with superhero comic books, thereby addressing the comic book fans who largely constitute Smith's fan base. Chapter IV offers a bisexual reading of Smith's third feature film, Chasing Amy (1997). Chapter V examines Smith's later films Dogma (1999), and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001), arguing that they function generically as queer road movies. Chapter VI analyzes Smith's public persona as an indie cinema icon who uses ironic, ambiguous modes of self-presentation to "have it both ways," maintaining an appeal for both homophobic and queer-friendly audiences, thereby demonstrating Smith's keen understanding of self-promotion and the economic structures of independent cinema.
Adviser: Kathleen Rowe Karlyn
en_US
University of Oregon
University of Oregon theses, Dept. of English, Ph. D., 2008;
Film studies
Gender studies
Film
Generation X
Auteur
Gender
Queer
Independent cinema
Smith, Kevin, 1970-
Falling Out of the Closet: Kevin Smith, Queerness, and Independent Film
Kevin Smith, Queerness, and Independent Film
Thesis

Pollard, Jacqueline Anne
2010-04-26T21:35:14Z
2010-04-26T21:35:14Z
2009-09
http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10333
x, 175 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.
This dissertation considers the formal and thematic camaraderie between T. S. Eliot and Djuna Barnes. The Waste Land 's poet, whom critics often cite as exemplary of reactionary high modernism, appears an improbable companion to Nightwood 's novelist, who critics, such as Shari Benstock, characterize as epitomizing "Sapphic modernism." However, Eliot and Barnes prove complementary rather than antithetical figures in their approaches to the collapse of historical and religious authority. Through close readings, supplemented by historical and literary sources, I demonstrate how Eliot, in his criticism and poems such as "Gerontion," and Barnes, in her trans-generic novel Nightwood , recognize the instability of history as defined by man and suggest the necessity of mythmaking to establish, or confirm, personal identity. Such mythmaking incorporates, rather than rejects, traditional Christian signs. I examine how, in Eliot's poems of the 1920s and in Barnes's novel, these writers drew on Christian symbols to evoke a nurturing, intercessory female parallel to the Virgin Mary to investigate the hope for redemption in a secular world. Yet Eliot and Barnes arrive at contrary conclusions. Eliot's poems increasingly relate femininity to Christian transcendence; this corresponds with a desire to recapture a unified sensibility, which, Eliot argued, dissolved in the post-Reformation era. In contrast, Barnes's Jewish and homosexual characters find transcendence unattainable. As embodied in her novel's characters, the Christian feminine ideal fails because the idealization itself extends from exclusionary dogma; any aid it promises proves ineffectual, and the novel's characters, including Dr. Matthew O'Connor and Nora Flood, remain locked in temporal anguish. Current trends in modernist studies consider the role of myth in understanding individuals' creation of self or worldview; this perspective applies also in analyzing religion's role insofar as it aids the individual's search for identity and a place in history. Consequently, this dissertation helps to reinvigorate the discussion of religion's significance in a literary movement allegedly defined by its secularism. Moreover, in presenting Eliot and Barnes together, I reveal a kinship suggested by their deployment of literary history, formal innovation, and questions about religion's value. This study repositions Barnes and brings her work into the canonical modernist dialogue.
Committee in charge: Paul Peppis, Chairperson, English;
Suzanne Clark, Member, English;
John Gage, Member, English;
Jenifer Presto, Outside Member, Comparative Literature
en_US
University of Oregon
University of Oregon theses, Dept. of English, Ph. D., 2009;
Gender
Belief
Women in literature
Christianity in literature
Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965
Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood
Modern literature
Women's studies
American literature
Gender studies
Femininity in literature
The gender of belief: Women and Christianity in T. S. Eliot and Djuna Barnes
Women and Christianity in T. S. Eliot and Djuna Barnes
Thesis

Coronado, Teresa Marie Freeman, 1975-
2009-01-16T02:14:27Z
2009-01-16T02:14:27Z
2008-06
http://hdl.handle.net/1794/8309
x, 196 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.
This project critiques the performance of class identity through the works of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial and early national period authors using the lens of humor, primarily as posed by Elliot Oring and Henri Bergson's theories of laughter and the ridiculous. My argument is that under the guise of laughter these works conceal the underpinnings of an American class system which can be revealed through close reading and historical research.
In my dissertation, I examine the performance of each author in his or her own autobiography and the reflection of that performance within the larger frame of the development of American status structures. The characters in the texts of the authors I work with in this project demonstrate the use of the comic persona to, as scholar Robert Micklus states, "locate the butt of ridicule anywhere but in their own mirrors"; however, in my project I examine this within the context of class. Chapter I examines the work of Madame Sarah Knight, The Journal of Madame Knight, and William Byrd II's The Secret History of the Line --both of whom use humor to disguise their class insecurities. In Chapter II, I examine the performance of class hierarchy, as seen through Franklin's Autobiography and John Robert Shaw's John Robert Shaw: An Autobiography of Thirty Years, 1777-1807. In Chapter III, I examine the complications of race involved in class relations, using John Marrant's autobiography, A Narrative of the Life of John Marrant, a Free Black. Chapter IV examines David Crockett's humorous performance of the middle landscape frontiersman as part of a valorized national identity in The Narrative of David Crockett.
The ideology that prompts the so-called invisibility of class in United States society today requires us to examine it under a critical lens; this project uses humor as that lens. In questioning the laughter of early American texts, we can see the class divides of early American society being created--an important step to realizing how these divides are maintained in our world today.
Adviser: Gordon Sayre
en_US
University of Oregon
University of Oregon theses, Dept. of English, Ph. D., 2008;
American literature
American studies
Gender
Politics
Ecocriticism
Social class
Humor
Autobiography
Locating the butt of ridicule: Humor and social class in early American literature
Thesis

Wardell, Kathryn Brenna
2011-07-28T17:02:50Z
2011-07-28T17:02:50Z
2010-06
http://hdl.handle.net/1794/11457
viii, 261 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.
My dissertation analyzes the rake, the libertine male, a figure whose liminal masculinity and transgressive appetites work both to stabilize and unsettle hegemony in the texts in which he appears. The rake may seem no more than a sexy bad boy, unconnected to wider social, political, and economic concerns. However, my project reveals his central role in reflecting, even shaping, anxieties and desires regarding gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity. I chart the rake's progress from his origins in the Restoration era to the early twenty-first century. Chapter II examines William Wycherley's comedy The Country Wife in concert with John Dryden's Marriage à la Mode and Aphra Behn's The Rover to analyze the rake's emergence in seventeenth-century theatre and show that his transgression of borders real and figurative plays out the anxieties and aspirations of an emerging British empire. Chapter III uses John Gay's ballad opera The Beggar's Opera, a satiric interrogation of consumerism and criminality, to chart the rake in eighteenth-century British theatre as Britain's investment in global capitalism and imperialism increased. My discussion of Opera is framed by Richard Steele's early-century sentimental comedy The Conscious Lovers and Hannah Cowley's late-century The Belle's Stratagem, a fusion of sentiment and wit. Chapter IV hinges the project's theatre and film sections, analyzing Oscar Wilde's fin-de-siècle comedy The Importance of Being Earnest as a culmination of generations of theatre rakes and an anticipation of the film rakes of the modern and post-modern eras. Dion Boucicault's mid-century London Assurance is used to set up Wilde's queering of the rake figure Chapter V brings the rake to a new medium, film, and a new nation, the United States, as the figure catalyzes American tension over race and gender in early twentieth-century films such as Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat, George Melford's The Sheik, and Ernest Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise. My final chapter reads contemporary films, including Jenniphr Goodman's The Tao of Steve, Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz's About a Boy, and Gore Verbinski's trilogy Pirates of the Caribbean for Disney Studios, to assess the ways in which millennial western masculinity is in stasis.
Committee in charge: Dianne Dugaw, Co-Chair;
Priscilla Ovalle, Co-Chair;
Kathleen Karlyn;
John Schmor
en_US
University of Oregon
University of Oregon theses, Dept. of English, Ph. D., 2010;
Rake
Film
Gender
Men
Restoration
Homoerotic
Masculinity
Theater
British and Irish literature
Gender studies
Film studies
British and Irish literature
Masculinity in literature
Masculinity in motion pictures
English drama -- History and criticism
English literature -- Themes, motives
Masculinity -- History
The rake's progress: Masculinities on stage and screen
Masculinities on stage and screen
Thesis

Stabile, Carol
Bronstein, Phoebe
2013-10-10T23:18:32Z
2013-10-10T23:18:32Z
2013-10-10
http://hdl.handle.net/1794/13412
This dissertation traces the emergence of the U.S. South and the region's role in primetime television, from the post-World War II era through Reagan's election in 1980. These early years defined, as Herman Gray suggests in Watching Race, all subsequent representations of blackness on television. This defining moment, I argue, is one inextricably tethered to the South and the region's anxiety ridden and complicated relationship with television. This anxiety was rooted in the progress and increasing visibility of the Civil Rights Movement, concern over growing white southern audiences in the wake of the FCC freeze (ended in 1952), and the fear and threat of a southern backlash against racially progressive programming. From the short-lived drama Bourbon Street Beat to the success of Andy Griffith, these concerns structured and policed the content of television, producing puzzling and often contradictory visions of the South. The representational maneuvers enacted by these shows attempted to render that threatening South safe for national consumption, while simultaneously invoking southern manners and downhome southern living as emblematic of all that is good about America. That is, the South was both the threat to the democratic nation and the cure for all that ailed a nation in crisis. In returning to the South during the formative years of primetime and at a moment where the region visibly and visually contested narratives of a democratic nation, my dissertation provides a foundation for thinking through a contemporary landscape saturated in problematically post-racial southern imagery.
en_US
University of Oregon
All Rights Reserved.
Gender
Race
Television History
the South
Televising the South: Race, Gender, and Region in Primetime, 1955-1980
Electronic Thesis or Dissertation
Ph.D.
doctoral
Department of English
University of Oregon